It’s been a slow weekend for news. Health care, with nothing new, and Afghanistan, which has been beaten to death everywhere, have dominated the news cycle, unless you count Tiger, and don’t even ask me to go there.
A Facebook Farmville friend named Candace pointed me to a hilarious takeoff on the iPhone commercials, so for your enjoyment, I’ll lead with that.
When President Obama appointed Dana Perino to a key post in his administration, I called on him to change his mind. She keeps telling lies to cover up the criminal incompetence of the Bush/GOP Regime. Here’s the latest.
According to President Bush's former press secretary, the former president's refusal to sign the Kyoto climate change deal in 2005 set the stage for current climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.
"Because [Bush] declined to go forward with Kyoto, which is ultimately the right thing to do because the major economies like China and India weren't at the table, he worked to get them at the table and now this meeting is the next logical step in that process," Perino told Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday.
Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>
Hard to believe? Here’s the video:
Of course she did it on the GOP Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise. I repeat my call for President Obama to fire Dana the Dingbat!
The more we move toward tolerance, the more relevant we become.
The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles has elected the first openly lesbian bishop since the national church lifted a ban that sought to bar gays and lesbians from the church's highest ordained ministry, the church announced.
Members of the church, who met here for their annual convention, elected the Reverend Canon Mary Glasspool, 55, who has maintained an open relationship with another woman since 1988.
Another gay candidate, the Reverend John Kirkley of San Francisco, withdrew late Friday, the church announcement said.
Glasspool received 153 votes in the clergy order and 203 lay votes, meeting the required majority of ballots after the Convention's necessary quorum was declared.
Consent to the election of Glasspool by the bishops and standing committees of the Episcopal Church's other 108 dioceses will now be requested under longstanding denominational procedures.
"I am very excited about the future of the whole Episcopal Church, and I see the Diocese of Los Angeles leading the way into that future," said Glasspool, a native of Staten Island, New York, whose father was also an Episcopal priest…
Inserted from <Raw Story>
I heartily applaud this move as a step forward for the Episcopal Church, because authentic Christianity is inclusive, not exclusive.
It’s Pearl Harbor Day, and I’d like to take this occasion to thank all of our veterans, especially those who served in WWII.
I managed to keep up with comments yesterday, despite enjoying my football day. This result was particularly satisfying, even if I didn’t get to see the game.
I hope to get some visiting in today. I just received my Windows 7 disk. I need to do a backup before installing it, so it will depend on how long that takes.
Today’s Jig Zone puzzle took me 3:50. To do it, Click Here. How did you do?
Here’s your cartoon:
OGIM!!
Frequently in the media, as well as in comments by right wingers on some of the blogs I visit, I find members of the Tea Party movement complaining about the use of the term “teabaggers” to describe them. I have replied to such comments that the term is one that the Tea Party movement adopted for themselves. Still, this raises the question of whether or not we on the left have been unfair to the teabaggers. Rachel Maddow aired an excellent video on the subject.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
I hope you found that as entertaining as I did. Nevertheless, after careful consideration, I have determined that we have been unfair to teabaggers and therefore, an apology is in order. So to teabaggers, wherever you are, I apologize. You should have been able to pursue your taste for scrotum dipping without being compared to extremist right wing ideologues. However, since the term has taken hold so predominantly since the Tea Party movement stole your identity, I suggest that you find another term to describe your practice.
I’ve always enjoyed listening to Andrew Sullivan. While I often disagree with him, I respect his integrity. For this article, I owe a Hat-Tip, a big thank you, and a {{hug}} to Lisa G. She left the URL to this article in a comment yesterday.
...The relationship of a writer to a party or movement is, of course, open to discussion. I understand the point that Jonah Goldberg makes that politics is not about pure intellectual individualism; it requires understanding power, its organization and the actual choices that real politics demands. You can hold certain principles inviolate and yet also be prepared to back politicians or administrations that violate them because it's better than the actual alternatives at hand. I also understand the emotional need to have a default party position, other things being equal. But there has to come a point at which a movement or party so abandons core principles or degenerates into such a rhetorical septic system that you have to take a stand. It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so - against the conservative degeneracy in front of us. Those who have taken such a stand - to one degree or other - demand respect. And this blog, while maintaining its resistance to cliquishness, has been glad to link to writers as varied as Bruce Bartlett or David Frum or David Brooks or Steve Chapman or Kathleen Parker or Conor Friedersdorf or Jim Manzi or Jeffrey Hart or Daniel Larison who have broken ranks in some way or other.
I can't claim the same courage as these folks because I've always been fickle in partisan terms. To have supported Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Dole and Bush and Kerry and Obama suggests I never had a party to quit. I think that may be because I wasn't born here. I have no deep loyalty to either American party in my bones or family or background, and admire presidents from both parties. My partisanship remains solely British - I'm a loyal Tory. But my attachment to the Anglo-American conservative political tradition, as I understand it, is real and deep and the result of sincere reflection on the world as I see it. And I want that tradition to survive because I believe it is a vital complement to liberalism in sustaining the genius and wonder of the modern West.
For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name "conservative" in America. I still do, even though I am much more of a limited government type than almost any Democrat and cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I'm not). My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in "The Conservative Soul"). Here goes:
I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.
I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.
I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.
I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.
I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.
I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.
I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.
I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.
I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.
I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.
I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.
I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.
I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.
I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.
I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.
I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations... [emphasis added]
Inserted from <The Atlantic>
Seldom have I seen anything that even approaches the clarity and quality of this analysis of today’s GOP. It’s almost shameful to our side that it came from a conservative, but I welcome it. Thanks again, Lisa!
The insurance industry has demonstrated once again why we need a strong public option to provide Americans a choice other than Big Insurance.
Aetna announced that it will deliberately cut 600,000 people from its insurance rolls to raise its profits next year:
In a third-quarter earnings conference call in late October, officials at Aetna announced that in an effort to improve on a less-than-anticipated profit margin in 2009, they would be raising prices on their consumers in 2010. The insurance giant predicted that the company would subsequently lose between 300,000 and 350,000 members next year from its national account as well as another 300,000 from smaller group accounts.
…
Aetna's decision to downsize the number of clients in favor of higher premiums is, as one industry analyst told American Medical News, a "pretty candid" admission. It also reflects the major concerns offered by health care reform proponents and supporters of a public option for insurance coverage, who insist that the private health insurance industry is too consumed with the bottom line. A government-run plan would operate solely off its members' premiums.
Aetna is saying they want to make more money on each person they insure to please Wall Street, so they are raising prices. It doesn't matter to them if this action causes them to lose some less profitable customers, customers that actually use their health care benefits. In fact, they welcome it. They are more than happy to let these people be priced out of the market, go uninsured, go bankrupt, or lose their lives. These people are not bringing in enough money for Aetna, so Aetna would rather not have them as a customer.
Aetna is following the insurance company playbook as articulated last year by Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly when she said, "We will not sacrifice profitability for membership." In other words, the insurance companies won't sell health coverage to more people if it means they will make less money on each person.
They don't care about coverage, they just care about profits. This is exactly why we must have a public health insurance option.
Health reform without a public option will not not work. The insurance industry playbook would still be on the table, and they would still find ways to cut people for more profit. Even with laws against insurance companies denying care, they would still find ways to do it… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <NOW! Blog>
Let’s not forget who is the Senator from Aetna. Joe LIEberman, should be stripped of his committee chairmanship, still promises to vote against ANY public option, even a triggered one.
I never thought I’d say this, but the GOP has actually proposed an amendment to the health care bill with which I agree.
When Senators Tom Coburn and David Vitter decided to make fun of Democratic efforts to pass health reform, they probably did not see this coming.
By proposing an amendment that would require members of Congress to register for public health care if the so-called public option were to pass, the two Republicans hoped to further deter their colleagues from voting in favor.
The hitch in their plan: several Democrats took them seriously.
Speaking to MSNBC on Friday night, Sen. Sherrod Brown explained why he offered to co-sponsor the amendment.
"[With] Sen. Coburn, nine times we said we wanted to co-sponsor," he said. "Usually it takes once and they say yes. I've always accepted that; so has everybody I know in the Senate. Nine times we asked to co-sponsor and their office either just said we'll get back to you or ignored our calls and our emails because it was all a sham. ... They clearly don't like the public option. They were making fun of it. Their whole game is to delay and deceive and to play political games. ... And so, it's just a little partisan game they're playing."… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Raw Story>
I think Representatives and Senators should get whatever health coverage they provide for us in this bill, whether or not it contains the public option. If they leave us with nothing, nothing is what they should get. Perhaps if we tell Republicans that this is really a pubic option, they will support it. Whether in the Minneapolis Airport restroom, in the boudoir of the DC Madam, in the pages cloak room, or on the Appalachian trail, they have a demonstrated affinity for that!
Yesterday I got caught up on visiting other blogs. Today is football day, so I’ll be3 scarce if there’s a decent game on.
Today’s Jig Zone puzzle took me 3:50. To do it, Click Here. How did you do?
Here’s you cartoon:
Have a great Sunday!
The more our government bails out Wall Street and ignores Main Street, the more impressed I become with Elizabeth Warren. Here she discusses the needs of the middle class.
Elizabeth Warren is one of the few public figures who understands and acknowledges the enormous economic stress placed on the middle class, and actually cares what happens to them:
While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.
And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.
Pundits talk about "populist rage" as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class. But they have it wrong. Families understand with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same rules that govern Wall Street. They understand that no American family is "too big to fail." They recognize that business models have shifted and that big banks are pulling out all the stops to squeeze families and boost revenues. They understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.
Families are ready for change. According to polls, large majorities of Americans have welcomed the Obama Administration's proposal for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The CFPA would be answerable to consumers -- not to banks and not to Wall Street. The agency would have the power to end tricks-and-traps pricing and to start leveling the playing field so that consumers have the tools they need to compare prices and manage their money. The response of the big banks has been to swing into action against the Agency, fighting with all their lobbying might to keep business-as-usual. They are pulling out all the stops to kill the agency before it is born. And if those practices crush millions more families, who cares -- so long as the profits stay high and the bonuses keep coming… [emphasis original]
Inserted from <Crooks and Liars>
Here’s more:
I see this as a five step process. Replace Geithner at Treasury with Elizabeth Warren.
Second, Replace Bernanke at the Fed with whomever Elizabeth Warren recommends for that post.
Third, break up the companies considered too big to fail.
Fourth, regulate Big Finance with an iron hand.
Fifth, consign the corporate criminals responsible for this mess to the seventh level of Hades to suffer eternal torment through the ministrations of our resident demon in charge of such matters, Jack Jodell.
When illegal spying on Americans by our own government was at its height, during the Bush/GOP Regime, I often wondered why the telecoms and major ISPs were so anxious to join in. I concluded that they must be getting big bucks, but I never realized quite how had it is. You are paying so much to have our government to your telephone calls, read your email, and track your web surfing that they dont want you to know how much it is.
Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?
That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”
“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company writes.
Verizon took a different stance. It objected to the release (.pdf) of its Law Enforcement Legal Compliance Guide because it might “confuse” customers and lead them to think that records and surveillance capabilities available only to law enforcement would be available to them as well — resulting in a flood of customer calls to the company asking for trap and trace orders.
“Customers may see a listing of records, information or assistance that is available only to law enforcement,” Verizon writes in its letter, “but call in to Verizon and seek those same services. Such calls would stretch limited resources, especially those that are reserved only for law enforcement emergencies.”
Other customers, upon seeing the types of surveillance law enforcement can do, might “become unnecessarily afraid that their lines have been tapped or call Verizon to ask if their lines are tapped (a question we cannot answer).”
Verizon does disclose a little tidbit in its letter, saying that the company receives “tens of thousands” of requests annually for customer records and information from law enforcement agencies.
Soghoian filed his records request to discover how much law enforcement agencies — and thus U.S. taxpayers — are paying for spy documents and surveillance services with the aim of trying to deduce from this how often such requests are being made. Soghoian explained his theory on his blog, Slight Paranoia:
In the summer of 2009, I decided to try and follow the money trail in order to determine how often Internet firms were disclosing their customers’ private information to the government. I theorized that if I could obtain the price lists of each ISP, detailing the price for each kind of service, and invoices paid by the various parts of the Federal government, then I might be able to reverse engineer some approximate statistics. In order to obtain these documents, I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with every part of the Department of Justice that I could think of.
The first DoJ agency to respond to his request was the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), which indicated that it had price lists available for Cox Communications, Comcast, Yahoo and Verizon. But because the companies voluntarily provided the price lists to the government, the FOIA allows the companies an opportunity to object to the disclosure of their data under various exemptions. Comcast and Cox were fine with the disclosure, Soghoian reported.
He found that Cox Communications charges $2,500 to fulfill a pen register/trap-and-trace order for 60 days, and $2,000 for each additional 60-day-interval. It charges $3,500 for the first 30 days of a wiretap, and $2,500 for each additional 30 days. Thirty days worth of a customer’s call detail records costs $40.
Comcast’s pricing list, which was already leaked to the internet in 2007, indicated that it charges at least $1,000 for the first month of a wiretap, and $750 per month thereafter… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Wired>
If you actually believe that the only government spying on US Citizens is through legal subpoenas, I have a wonderful bridge for sale in a major east coast city. I believe it continues, because President Obama had not delivered on either the transparency on this issue or the repeal of related parts of the Patriot Act he promised during his campaign. I suspect that the price we pay for illegal spying on us is much higher than for the legal wiretaps.
